There is now a new Studio J Express Collection designed by our studio artists with your holiday photos in mind. Like our other Express Collections, this limited edition collection will offer you 10 pre-designed layouts plus a first and last page, all featuring designs from the Yuletide Carol paper packet. With a grand total of 65 photo wells, this collection gives you many options to preserve the holiday season! The collection will only be available through February 28, so be sure to make time in the first part of the year to add your photos and order your layouts to keep the memories fresh for years to come!

]]>Discover the creative potential of being able to add and customize photo wells on your Studio J layouts.

One of the new features it to start from a completely blank layout. This allows you to create your own customized pages or you can also use this create custom photo sizes and have them printed for your traditional scrapbook layouts.

]]>Use Studio J®, Close To My Heart’s online scrapbooking software, to create a beautiful layout in just minutes by watching this month’s Love Your Layout(sm) video. You’ll learn creative techniques on how to create paint-splattered accents, stack My Stickease® images, and add a date for a gnarly layout in the Later Sk8r kit. Log in to Studio J to create it yourself while you watch!

Many of you have already taken advantage of February’s reduced pricing for Studio J® layouts. Now Close to My Heart is extending this awesome pricing through March 15, giving you even more time to create and purchase layouts at the wonderful $5 per layout price. Your order must be placed before 11:59 pm (MT) on March 15.

]]>Use Studio J®, Close To My Heart’s online scrapbooking software, to create a beautiful layout in just minutes by watching this month’s Love Your Layout(sm) video. You’ll learn creative techniques on how to design with My Stickease® images, create your own custom titles, and more. Log in to Studio J to create it yourself while you watch!

]]>Even though Studio J® is fast and easy to use, it is helpful to know some great tricks that can make customizing your layouts even more exciting. Here are some Studio J tricks straight from our professional Close To My Heart artists:

1. Customize your background and texture paper. You can change the color and intensity of the background and texture paper included in whichever kit you choose. Simply select the piece of background and texture paper, change the color in the color selection tool, and increase or decrease the intensity of the color in that same popup box.

2. Crop My Stickease® quotes, titles, and tags. The cropping feature on the My Stickease images allows you to select a section of a quote, title, or tag to use as a border or other embellishment.

3. Create a customized My Stickease image. If you have a specific image in mind to use as an embellishment on your page, you can create a customized My Stickease to fit your theme perfectly. Simply add a text box, photo hanger, ribbon, ribbon slides, and Stickease to create the little suitcase! So easy! Be sure to crop or send elements behind other elements when necessary, and add several elements together for a unique look!

4. Select more than one element at a time. If you want to move several elements of your layout at once, simply click and drag your mouse around the elements you would like to select. Let’s take buttons, for example. After the buttons have been selected, you can click the icons in the popup box to choose to align the buttons vertically or horizontally if you desire.

5. Make faux washi tape with vellum text boxes. To create the look of a piece of clear washi tape, make a small rectangular text box, filled with vellum background (this is the default color for text boxes). You can make the tape strips as large or small as you want, or even layer them for more emphasis.

6. Stretch one photo across multiple photo wells. If you have fewer photos than photo wells, instead of deleting the excess wells, try scaling the picture to a larger size and then copying the picture to other photo wells and matching the photos up until they align with an almost seamless image. This trick works best with photo wells that are adjacent to each other.

7. Create ruffled ribbon. Select “Ribbons” in the drop-down menu under the Embellishments toolset. Choose ribbon tab and rotate the tab so that it is vertical on the page. Then layer several tabs on top of one another, sending every other one to the back to create a ruffled look.

8. Create a jagged border with text boxes. You can create a jagged border simply by rotating multiple text boxes about 45 degrees and making them the same color as the background. Put these boxes on top of a long, rectangular box of another color, and you’ve got a jagged border!

9. Change the background of your layout. Sometimes you may like the photo and journal arrangement in a layout, and yet want to change the background colors. Because photos sit on top of everything else, this is easy to do. Simply pull a journaling box over the space you want for a different background and fill it with a color from the color selection tool or a patterned paper from the Papers toolset. Then, send it backwards until the photo wells are on top of your new background.

Bonus Trick! Use keyboard keys to make embellishments. Did you know that some of the best tools for creating custom embellishments are the basic keys on your keyboard? It’s as simple as typing into a journaling box with no background color. Use periods to make a polka dot pattern, angle brackets to create a trendy Chevron look, overlapping pound signs to make burlap, question marks to make rope, and so much more!

]]>Moonlight Kit: Easy Photo Editing – Use Studio J®, Close To My Heart’s online scrapbooking software, to create a beautiful layout in just minutes by watching this month’s Love Your Layout video. You’ll learn creative techniques, including how to apply photo filters and create ruffled ribbon. Watch the video here and then log in to Studio J to try it yourself!

What a cute layout, and don’t limit yourself to just Halloween, it can be created for any pictures!

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You already know that Close To My Heart’s Studio J® online design software is a great deal, saving you lots of time and money. During October, you can get an even better value from Studio J — when you buy 9 layouts, you’ll get a 10th layout free!
Take advantage of this promotion by ordering in multiples of 10: Buy 9 to get 1 free layout, buy 18 to get 2 free layouts, etc. You can get up to 5 free layouts! It’s a fast and inexpensive way to get your pictures off your computer and into your scrapbooks! Since you can ship as many as 50 layouts together in a single box, the savings truly stack up the more layouts you order in October.

Don’t for get about our sensational new Express Collections that make it even easier for you to save time and complete even more layouts!

NEW, NEW NEW!! The recent enhancements to Studio J® make it a whole new tool for you. It is now faster and easier than ever to get professional results from your digital scrapbooking using the new Express Collections. Go to Studio J and try them out for yourself!

Use Close to My Heart’s online scrapbooking software, Studio J®, to create a beautiful layout in just minutes by watching this month’s Love Your Layout video. You’ll learn creative techniques, including how to create a journaling box with a photo background. Watch the video here and then log in to Studio J to try it yourself!

]]>Use Studio J® online design software to create a beautiful layout in just minutes by watching this month’s Love Your Layout video. You’ll learn creative techniques, including how to create the custom candy-stripe ribbon featured in this month’s layout. Watch the video here and then log in to StudioJ.com to try it yourself!

]]>Use Studio J® to create a beautiful layout in just minutes by watching this month’s Love Your Layout(sm) video. You’ll use text boxes in creative ways to add unique touches to your artwork. Watch the video here and then log into Studio J to try it yourself!

This month’s Love Your Layout installment is celebrating the sunshine. Watch the video to find out how to make another fabulous layout in Studio J®, using the Pemberley kit. Learn how to add wow to your photos and discover other techniques that will make your layouts shine! Discover Studio J!

This layout is featured on page 25 of the 2012 Spring/Summer Idea Book. It’s on my to-do list to recreate a version of this as a paper layout.